Tuesday, January 20, 2015

Pronunciation

One of the trends in my 2015 trends deck was 'Voice' - that is, the rise of voice search, people speaking to objects and more, and generally using voice rather than a keyboard.

This is fine if your brand's name is easy to pronounce, but if it's not it could bring problems.

What if it sounds like something else?

(For quite a while I had the Two Ronnies' 'Four Candles' sketch in my mind when I was thinking about the trend)

What if people don't know how to pronounce it? In an episode of The Sopranos, Tony talks about 'Hermeez' (it's 'ermez). I had a Chinese colleague who was crazy about Aquascutum, but couldn't pronounce it - and I think this is quite a common problem in China.

What about Mui Mui? Chloe Sevigny? Nike? (Nissan) Quashqai? Xiaomi?

I think some of these brands may start to produce films like these, or consciously work the pronunciation into their ads